Under
these circumstances, no common ground can be found, no dialogue conducted,
no compromise reached between “the good People” and their
candidate for “the Office of President”, on the one side,
and the Establishment and its candidate, on the other—any more
than common ground, dialogue, and compromise are possible between justice
and injustice, “the general Welfare” and the avarice of
special interests, or what the Second Amendment calls “the security
of a free State” as opposed to the oppression of a police state.
One side or the other must prevail. In this struggle, as General MacArthur
said: “There is no substitute for victory.”

B.
Mr. Trump (or any authentic political “outsider”) can depend
only on “the good People”; and “the good People”
can depend only on him. But to gain their confidence, Mr. Trump must
take “the good People” into his confidence, with confidence
that, knowing what he intends to do and why and how he intends to do
it, they will rally to him through every vicissitude which awaits them.

1.
He must convince “the good People” that he is committed
to fighting the battle, both before and especially after his election,
on their, not their enemies’, terms. At the minimum, that requires
bringing into his campaign, and eventually into his Administration,
a set of advisors not drawn from the ranks of the professional political
courtiers who have carried water for prior Administrations. The
sorry records of those Administrations provide conclusive evidence that
these individuals’ misguided conceptions of “public service”
have been the primary causes of, and therefore will never provide the
solutions for, America’s woes.

2.
Mr. Trump must emphasize that no one can “make America
great again” unless and until “the good People” steel
themselves to yank this country by its bootstraps out of the very deep
hole into which past generations of incompetent and disloyal politicians
have cast it. In line with the old adage that “a pessimist in
an optimist who knows the facts”, he must warn “the good
People” that a great deal of economic pain and social unrest will
be unavoidable in the short term—and that stern measures must
be implemented, prodigious efforts expended and costs incurred, and
agonizing sacrifices endured in the near term—if the necessary
reforms are to be achieved in the long run. That he is the one Presidential
candidate ready and willing to take charge and shoulder responsibility
is not enough. For he can succeed only if “the good People”
are prepared to do their part to the utmost of their abilities. He can
be no more than the obstetrician for America’s renaissance; “the
good People” must give birth to it.

3.
Glittering generalities, “sound bites”, and slogans will
not suffice. Rather, Mr. Trump must set out with specificity
the nonnegotiable reforms his Administration will implement. Here, I
can touch on only a few of these, and only in a limited fashion:

(a)
In furtherance of the President’s oath of office—that he
“will to the best of [his] Ability, preserve, protect and defend
the Constitution of the United States”—Mr. Trump must promise
to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”. Without
that as the guiding principle and constant practice of his Administration,
nothing of permanent value will be achieved.

(b)
In fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence, he must assure “the
good People” that he will bend his every effort to preserve this
country’s national sovereignty, integrity, and identity—not
only by securing its borders against invasions of illegal aliens, but
also by rooting out those internal subversives who are employing “multiculturalism”
as a battering-ram to break down America’s political and social
cohesion, preliminary to the submergence of “the good People”
in a supra-national “new world order” which
will eradicate “the separate and equal station” “among
the powers of the earth * * * to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s
God entitle them”.

That
“the political class” and its mouthpieces in “the
mainstream media” have attacked Mr. Trump with the ferocity of
mad dogs because of his rather mild pronouncements to date on the issue
of illegal immigration demonstrates how critical the elimination of
America’s national independence and integrity is to the Establishment’s
achievement of its long-range goals—and therefore how vital the
preservation of that independence and integrity is to “the good
People’s” permanent interests. I characterize Mr. Trump’s
pronouncements as “rather mild”, because he has yet to point
out that, perforce of both general constitutional principles and specific
statutes, a patriotic President is entitled to, and can, stop alien
invasions in their tracks. See my NewsWithViews commentaries
“How the President Can
Secure the Borders” (18 August 2015) and “A
Trumped-Up Controversy” (20 February 2016).

(c)
Because “representative government” cannot function if Americans
do not know what their ostensible “representatives” are
actually doing, and why they are doing it, Mr. Trump must promise “the
good People” that he will put paid to the present-day fetish of
governmental secrecy and lies (which depend upon secrecy for their efficacy).
His Administration must open the public records to public inspection
to the fullest extent consistent with the constitutional definition
of “national security”—that is, the security of the
nation, not the security of “the political class” and its
string-pullers in the Establishment.

For
a prime example, Americans must be afforded access to all of the public
(and, to the extent possible, private) records concerning the 9/11 event;
and those records must be subjected to the most wide-ranging critical
analyses, letting the chips fall where they may. In addition to that,
novel methods for elucidation of the truth must be employed. Being something
of a scientist myself, I favor actual experiments. Every theory which
can be disproved through experiment must be discarded. So, as a scientific
first step in testing prior Administrations’ theories of what
happened on 9/11, Mr. Trump should promise that his Administration will
build an exact replica of World Trade Center Building 7 as it existed
on that fateful day—set it on fire—and see whether or not
it collapses into its own footprint at near free-fall speed, as did
the original. If it does not, certain conclusions can be drawn, on the
basis of which further actions can be taken. In light of the serious
consequences which this country has already suffered, and will continue
to endure, because of the Establishment’s theories of 9/11, whatever
such an experiment may cost will hardly be excessive.

(d)
Mr. Trump should explain to “the good People” that, by setting
aside all constitutionally unwarranted governmental secrecy, his Administration
will be able to enforce the Bill of Rights and other constitutional
and statutory guarantees of Americans’ freedoms in a rigorous
fashion against rogue public officials and their co-conspirators in
the private sector. The Constitution’s goal to “establish
Justice” can never be fulfilled except perforce of the principle
that no one is “too big to jail”. For far too long “the
political class” has been able to sweep its serial malfeasances
under the rug, either through the wrongdoers’ suppression of the
evidence of their wrongdoing, or by grants of “immunity”
to one set of wrongdoers by another set of wrongdoers when wrongdoing
slips into the light of day. The time has come to employ a firmer broom
in more trustworthy hands. For, as the old saying has it, “a new
broom sweeps clean”—and an iron broom sweeps cleaner yet.
Such a thoroughgoing housecleaning is especially needed with respect
to those rogue officials whose “long train of abuses and usurpations,
pursuing invariably the same Object” has “evince[d] a design
to reduce [Americans] under absolute Despotism”. As the apt slogan
of the Navy’s “Silent Service” had it in World War
II, “find them, chase them, sink them”.

(e)
Of all possible wrongdoing by rogue public officials, nothing could
be worse than fomenting international warfare. Not only because modern
warfare is hideously homicidal and egregiously expensive, but especially
because the prosecution of wars abroad inevitably encourages the imposition
of despotism at home. “[T]he common defence” is
the constitutional standard. Therefore, Mr. Trump must assure Americans
that he will end America’s involvement in aggressive military
adventures overseas. Moreover, he must guarantee that he will see all
of those rogue public officials who and the private special interests
which have fomented or otherwise been responsible for or otherwise complicitous
in such adventures brought to justice, through execution of those “Laws
of the Union” which enforce the principles of the Nuremberg tribunal.
See Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution
of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington,
D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), Volume I, arts.
6(a), 7, 8, and 9, at 5-6. See also my NewsWithViews commentary
“A New Nuremberg Moment”
(6 September 2013). After all, these crimes—steeped in conspiracy
and aggression—have resulted in hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of needless deaths and injuries; destruction of the political
integrity, social stability, and economic viability of whole countries;
and huge wastage of resources by “military-industrial complexes”
in both the United States and the other nations which have foolishly
participated in these operations. And they continue even today, unabated
in their savagery. See, e.g., Felicity Arbuthnot, “US
Apocalypse in Mosul in the Guise of Bombing ISIS”. For such
wrongdoing there can be neither excuse, nor exoneration, nor expunction
from the pages of history.

Mr.
Trump recently announced his “foreign policy” with a rousing
speech. Yet it lacked the clarity and wisdom of George Washington’s
Farewell Address with respect to foreign affairs, alliances, and the
like. (Indeed, Mr. Trump could not go wrong by adopting as his guiding
principles all of the tenets of that document.) Much of his
speech was, as the wag once said, “déjà vue
all over again”. To be sure, Mr. Trump’s reliance on the
principle of, shall we say, “strength at home, businesslike diplomacy
abroad” is a workmanlike approach, along the lines of Theodore
Roosevelt’s precept, “speak softly and carry a big stick”.
Nonetheless, I wonder how anyone can imagine, on the one hand, that
this country cannot control its own borders to the extent of repelling
an invasion of illegal aliens from a nation as militarily impotent as
Mexico, but, on the other hand, that it can deploy to the very frontiers
of Russia and China sufficient forces to awe those powerful nations
into sheepish compliance with policies dictated from the District of
Columbia at odds with their own compelling national interests. Indeed,
one need look only to the débâcles in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Libya to understand the limits the real world imposes on the hubris
and fantasies of American military interventionists. (The only saving
grace here is that Mr. Trump evidently desires to avoid a major war,
whereas Hillary Clinton would likely prove a worse warmonger, and more
feckless a war-fighter, than even George W. Bush.)

Finally,
Mr. Trump’s promise to crush ISIS militarily rests on the naïve
premiss that ISIS is some truly “foreign” force. He would
do better first to investigate whether ISIS is in large measure the
product of the devious intentions or simple-minded incompetence of the
CIA and the Pentagon—and that therefore the initial step in the
process of eradicating ISIS must be a thoroughgoing housecleaning of
those agencies. (A parallel investigation should be conducted to determine
the extent to which certain of America’s ostensible “allies”
are at fault in this matter, too.) Mr. Trump might also want to inquire,
for example, why the NSA, the DIA, the CIA, the FBI, FINCEN, the IRS-CID,
and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies at home and abroad
have not been able (or willing) to employ their extensive networks of
surveillance to ferret out the sources of and routes for ISIS’s
funding. After all, although logistics is not everything, everything
depends on logistics. How does ISIS raise its revenue and pay its bills?
Who are ISIS’s bankers, money-launderers, and so on? And why have
they not been exposed, and steps taken to eradicate their operations?
Inquiring minds surely want to know.

(f)
As far as “domestic policy” is concerned , it will be essential
for a Trump Administration to restore the two great powers of government—the
Power of the Sword and the Power of the Purse—to “the good
People’s” own hands. For no one else is sufficiently trustworthy
to exercise them.

(i)
Restoration of the Power of the Sword will require revitalization of
the Militia, about which I have written extensively elsewhere. Only
by “call[ing] forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union”
will “the good People” finally be able to deal with those
combinations too powerful to be suppressed by ordinary means, the continued
toleration of which threatens to destroy this country within the lifetimes
of most of the readers of this commentary. In particular, see
my NewsWithViews commentary “Donald
Trump and the Militia” (20 February 2016).

Revitalization
of the Militia will also be necessary to enable “the good People”
to deal in a constitutional fashion with the social unrest which will
arise out of the economic dislocations and hard times this country will
have to endure as part of the price of rebuilding the national economy.
See, e.g., my book By Tyranny Out of Necessity: The Bastardy of
“Martial Law”.

(ii)
Restoration of the Power of the Purse will require bridling the banks—first
and foremost, by compelling them to provide Americans with a constitutional
and economically sound monetary unit to compete with, and eventually
supplant, the Federal Reserve Note as this nation’s primary currency.
See, e.g., my NewsWithViews commentaries “A Cross of
Gold” (10 May 2011) and “Presidential Questions” (9
May 2015). It will also necessitate coming to grips with the problem
of the unpayable national debt—not by imposing “austerity”
on “the good People”, but by recognizing that much of this
debt has been incurred unconstitutionally (in terms of international
law, is so-called “odious debt”), and is therefore unenforceable.
See, e.g., my NewsWithViews commentary “A Cross of Debt”
(10 February 2012). As a successful entrepreneur, Mr. Trump surely understands
that long-term business-relations, whether of a corporation or an entire
country, cannot be conducted on the basis of the uncertain value of
an unstable “rubber” currency, and that sometimes a declaration
of bankruptcy and concomitant cancellation of some and restructuring
of other debts is unavoidable.

(g)
In even the short run, little will be accomplished unless and until
a Trump Administration breaks the electoral stranglehold of the “two”
major political parties and the string-pullers behind them. This will
require radically diminishing, if not eliminating altogether, the ability
of organized wealth to maintain the oligopoly of those parties, to suppress
or capture legitimate political movements, and thereby perpetually to
misdirect the course of elections. That a handful of multi-billionaires,
primarily through the mega-corporations they own and the myriad special-interest
groups they spawn and finance, are suffered to dominate political affairs
in this country, setting “the good People” at defiance in
election after election, directly contradicts any rational conception
of “representative government” and “the general Welfare”.
Not only is that state of affairs unsound in principle, but also it
has turned out disastrously in practice. For all too long, these individuals
and institutions have controlled the composition of Congress, the Presidency,
and the Judiciary, as well as much of State and Local government—the
consequence being the mess in which this country now finds itself at
every level of the federal system. The simplistic theory that “corporate
money” can be equated with “free speech” in the political
realm has been tested by experiment, and found woefully wanting. (To
be sure, it might be argued that the corruption and degeneration of
American politics have been the products, not of the injection of wealth
per se into politics, but only of the faulty ideas that such
injection has promoted, and that if the wealthy were to marshal their
resources on behalf of good ideas this country would benefit. Yet there
is no denying that, only as a consequence of the massive amounts of
irresponsible wealth behind them could the bad ideas prevalent today
have become dominant in the political arena. And in politics one must
be extremely risk-averse, because the risks of error are too great to
be accepted.)

The
exclusion of “corporate money” from politics may appear
to be a problematic goal, because of the false notion promulgated by
the Supreme Court that corporations are “persons” with constitutional
rights equivalent to those of real flesh-and-blood individuals. The
“personhood” of corporations, however, is merely a sorry
legal fiction. Actually, it is a piece of pseudo-legalistic balderdash,
coming as it does from a Court with the effrontery to claim that actual
human beings who happen to be unborn are not constitutional “persons”.
In any event, no need exists for a constitutional amendment to recognize
the self-evident truth that corporations have no inherent rights, but
rather are merely the creatures of statutes, with only such legal relations
(rights, powers, privileges, immunities, and so on) as those statutes
grant, and which other statutes can deny, to them. Whatever it may have
opined on this subject in the past, the Supreme Court has a long history
of changing its mind on constitutional questions. See, e.g., Payne
v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 828-830 & note 1 (1991). So it
is not too much to expect that the Court can be persuaded to reverse
itself on this issue, too. And if the Justices refuse to come to their
constitutional senses, they can be shown the door; for their tenure
is solely “during good Behaviour”, which subversion of the
political process in favor of faux “persons” can never be.

Admittedly,
the foregoing may constitute no more than a “wish list”
for a true Presidential “outsider” who has yet to appear.
For only the future will tell whether Mr. Trump is such a man. Yet one
must always live in hope. If an obscure commentator such as this author,
living in the remote “Canoe Capital of Virginia”, can figure
out some of what needs to be done, then so can an eminent real-estate
shark from the Big Apple.

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Ultimately,
though, the critical question is not “Can Trump do it?”
or even “Will Trump do it?”, but instead “If Trump
tries to do it, will ‘the good People’ do their part?”
Will they demand his nomination, secure his election, and then stand
behind his Administration?

As
it always does, time will tell. Some Americans may yet imagine that
this country can still play for time. But, as the old saying has it,
time brings all things, bad as well as good. And anyone who can tell
time knows that “the good People” are running out of time.
It really may be “now or never”. If “the good People”
do not triumph by electing a true “outsider” to “the
Office of President” this November, America’s fate may be
sealed, once and for all, in the worst tragedy of modern times.

Edwin Vieira, Jr., holds four
degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and J.D. (Harvard Law School).

For more than thirty years he has
practiced law, with emphasis on constitutional issues. In the Supreme
Court of the United States he successfully argued or briefed the cases
leading to the landmark decisions Abood v. Detroit Board of Education,
Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, and Communications Workers of America
v. Beck, which established constitutional and statutory limitations on
the uses to which labor unions, in both the private and the public sectors,
may apply fees extracted from nonunion workers as a condition of their
employment.

He has written numerous monographs
and articles in scholarly journals, and lectured throughout the county.
His most recent work on money and banking is the two-volume Pieces
of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States
Constitution (2002), the most comprehensive study in existence of American
monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective. www.piecesofeight.us

He is also the co-author (under
a nom de plume) of the political novel CRA$HMAKER:
A Federal Affaire (2000), a not-so-fictional story of an engineered crash
of the Federal Reserve System, and the political upheaval it causes. www.crashmaker.com

The
exclusion of “corporate money” from politics may appear to
be a problematic goal, because of the false notion promulgated by the
Supreme Court that corporations are “persons” with constitutional
rights equivalent to those of real flesh-and-blood individuals.